painfully obvious, truly, it’s paining me.

August 24, 2007

So I was just reading Off Our Backs, that delightfully throwbacky second wave feminist newsjournal. 100% written by women, 100% about women. It’s pretty much the polar opposite of The New Yorker, which is maybe 8% written by women (I completely made up that figure, based on NYerWbW stats). The New Yorker, however, is a general interest publication, and pretty much everyone considers oob a special interest publication. I’m not saying that the quality of writing isn’t much better in The New Yorker, I’m just trying to make a very simple point here: a “New Yorker” written by women would not exist.

I know that this is so horribly simplistic and painfully obvious, but isn’t that the whole point? It should be obvious to anyone that we’re living in a horribly screwy society when magazines written by men about men are thought of as the default and magazines written by approximately the same proportion of women live in the magazine ghettos of either crazy feministy rags, lifestyley fluff, or tabloidey trash.

Again: it’s so damn obvious. But since things aren’t really changing, does it hurt to point it out?